Rating: 
Summary: Another sad one from Dick
Review: I think most of Dick's books reflect his sad life. Lincoln and Stanton are wonderful and yet terrible creations, like the owner and his schizophrenic daughter. His partner, Louis Rosen was against it. In the end, who is the mad one? Who is more alive? Who is more human? Now I am almost paranoid about robots.
Rating: 
Summary: More Lincoln, less (aberrant) thinkin'
Review: I'm a frequent reader of Dick's work, but this one left me feeling cheated.The novel contains many typical Dick elements: identity crises, some fascinating trivia, mental illness, his feel for workaday business, humor, and frequent twists and turns in the plot. The interesting part of the book is the "rebirth" of Civil War characters, and how they fit into a modern situation. Unfortunately, all that is abruptly dropped, and the last 1/3 of the book is devoted to treatment of the protagonist's mental illness. Only for die-hard Dick fans, and then if only on sale.
Rating:
Summary: a marvelous Dickian portrait of a man loosing touch
Review: Lots of people seem not to care for this book, which (along with Flow My Tears... Dr. Bloodmoney and Deus Irae) is one of my favorites, hands down. First of all- In this man's honest opinion, Phillip K. Dick is the ONE bona fide (as in Oh Brother- 'he's bona fide!') GENIUS of American letters, post-WWII. No one can match his breadth of vision, his uncanny ability to make his perceptions and dreams work while undermining one's sense of reality and existence as objective. He makes the lit-theory sci-fi jargonmeisters (Pynchon and Delillo, for example) look like the drivel-laden frauds they so clearly are; they write solely to ensure that lit-theory academics can continue their pointless little lives in their ivory towers and not have to work for a living- a relationship that works quite well for all involved, save those few elect that cherish honest literature... I see that damn blurb on many reviews of Dick's works- "The poor man's Pynchon,' what absolute tripe. In fact, Pynchon is the dickless man's Dick. At any rate, ranting aside, this little novel, published around the time of the first centennial passing of our Civil War, concerns a man (Louis Rosen) who is drawn into a relationship with his business partner's daughter (Pris Frauenzimmer): a cold, spiteful, driven, vicious woman (Dick's prototypical 'dark-haired girl,' a theme that reoccurs throughout his fiction) who creates simulacra of historical personages. These people she creates- one Abe Lincoln, and one Edwyn M. Stanton (Lincoln's Secretary of War) represent two potential poles of human experience- Stanton quickly adapts to the new world and becomes a shrewd advisor to Rosen's company while Lincoln can't really adapt to the world or the fact that he's a robot version of himself. Lincoln eventually becomes an idiot savant/mentor to Louis, who gradually succumbs to insanity and loss... It's an odd novel, not of the typical sci-fi adventure mode, and not your standard Dickian, hard-working everyman tries to figure out the nature of reality-type scenario. Still, it's an inimitably poignant little novel, one that ends abruptly and without much resolution. I really dig it. It also anticipates that buffoon Baudrilliard by about a quarter century. Here, I love this quote; "It was as if Pris, to me, were both life itself - and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending and yet also the spirit of existence itself. Movement: she was motion itself. Life in its growing, planning, calculating, harsh, thoughtless actuality. I could not stand having her around me; I could not stand being without her. Without Pris I dwindled away until I became nothing and eventually died like a bug in the back yard, unnoticed and unimportant; around her I was slashed, goaded, cut to pieces, stepped on - yet somehow I lived; in that, I was real. Did I enjoy suffering? No. It was that it seemed as if suffering was part of life, part of being with Pris. Without Pris there was no suffering, nothing erratic, unfair, unbalanced. But also, there was nothing alive, only small-time schlock schemes, a dusty little office with two or three men scrabbling in the sand..." It's a novel about a man loosing himself and clinging to the one real thing he knows- being tormented by a beautiful enigma. I can relate if you can't...
Rating:
Summary: a marvelous Dickian portrait of a man loosing touch
Review: Lots of people seem not to care for this book, which (along with Flow My Tears... Dr. Bloodmoney and Deus Irae) is one of my favorites, hands down. First of all- In this man's honest opinion, Phillip K. Dick is the ONE bona fide (as in Oh Brother- 'he's bona fide!') GENIUS of American letters, post-WWII. No one can match his breadth of vision, his uncanny ability to make his perceptions and dreams work while undermining one's sense of reality and existence as objective. He makes the lit-theory sci-fi jargonmeisters (Pynchon and Delillo, for example) look like the drivel-laden frauds they so clearly are; they write solely to ensure that lit-theory academics can continue their pointless little lives in their ivory towers and not have to work for a living- a relationship that works quite well for all involved, save those few elect that cherish honest literature... I see that damn blurb on many reviews of Dick's works- "The poor man's Pynchon,' what absolute tripe. In fact, Pynchon is the dickless man's Dick. At any rate, ranting aside, this little novel, published around the time of the first centennial passing of our Civil War, concerns a man (Louis Rosen) who is drawn into a relationship with his business partner's daughter (Pris Frauenzimmer): a cold, spiteful, driven, vicious woman (Dick's prototypical 'dark-haired girl,' a theme that reoccurs throughout his fiction) who creates simulacra of historical personages. These people she creates- one Abe Lincoln, and one Edwyn M. Stanton (Lincoln's Secretary of War) represent two potential poles of human experience- Stanton quickly adapts to the new world and becomes a shrewd advisor to Rosen's company while Lincoln can't really adapt to the world or the fact that he's a robot version of himself. Lincoln eventually becomes an idiot savant/mentor to Louis, who gradually succumbs to insanity and loss... It's an odd novel, not of the typical sci-fi adventure mode, and not your standard Dickian, hard-working everyman tries to figure out the nature of reality-type scenario. Still, it's an inimitably poignant little novel, one that ends abruptly and without much resolution. I really dig it. It also anticipates that buffoon Baudrilliard by about a quarter century. Here, I love this quote; "It was as if Pris, to me, were both life itself - and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending and yet also the spirit of existence itself. Movement: she was motion itself. Life in its growing, planning, calculating, harsh, thoughtless actuality. I could not stand having her around me; I could not stand being without her. Without Pris I dwindled away until I became nothing and eventually died like a bug in the back yard, unnoticed and unimportant; around her I was slashed, goaded, cut to pieces, stepped on - yet somehow I lived; in that, I was real. Did I enjoy suffering? No. It was that it seemed as if suffering was part of life, part of being with Pris. Without Pris there was no suffering, nothing erratic, unfair, unbalanced. But also, there was nothing alive, only small-time schlock schemes, a dusty little office with two or three men scrabbling in the sand..." It's a novel about a man loosing himself and clinging to the one real thing he knows- being tormented by a beautiful enigma. I can relate if you can't...
Rating:
Summary: Pretty dreadful, I fear.
Review: Man...what a disappointment. I've always loved PKD very much, so, as always, when I picked up this book and started reading, I had no doubt that it would be yet another mind-altering masterpiece. What I got was no such thing. It's obvious that Dick wasn't quite sure what he wanted it to do with this book; whether he wanted it to be about simalacra, or about Louis's relationship with Pris. Either of these would have been worthy of further pursuit, or indeed, the two could have been intertwined, each shedding light on the other. Dick utterly failed to do this, however, in spite of the back cover copy's feeble attempt to connect them. Instead, he simply drops the simulacra thread midstream, without ever having done anything meaningful with it. I very much get the impression that he just sort of got bored with it (which I can understand; it's certainly not his most inspired idea, even if it could have worked), and so he decided to focus the last part of the novel on Louis and Pris--which in turn fails to make any point, perhaps in consequence of the fact that most of it has been concentrating his energies on the simulacra. Furthermore, the first-person narrative seems pretty weak, to be honest, and half-hearted. I never *really* believed the narrator, the way I do with most of Dick's protagonists. We Can Build You really shouldn't have been published in its current form; there ARE some good things here, but it desperately needs a rewrite or two to filter out the bad. I don't think anything Dick writes is entirely without merit, but this is about as close as it comes. It's a mystery to me why Vintage chose to republish this, specifically, when there are so many better Dick novels long out-of-print.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty dreadful, I fear.
Review: Man...what a disappointment. I've always loved PKD very much, so, as always, when I picked up this book and started reading, I had no doubt that it would be yet another mind-altering masterpiece. What I got was no such thing. It's obvious that Dick wasn't quite sure what he wanted it to do with this book; whether he wanted it to be about simalacra, or about Louis's relationship with Pris. Either of these would have been worthy of further pursuit, or indeed, the two could have been intertwined, each shedding light on the other. Dick utterly failed to do this, however, in spite of the back cover copy's feeble attempt to connect them. Instead, he simply drops the simulacra thread midstream, without ever having done anything meaningful with it. I very much get the impression that he just sort of got bored with it (which I can understand; it's certainly not his most inspired idea, even if it could have worked), and so he decided to focus the last part of the novel on Louis and Pris--which in turn fails to make any point, perhaps in consequence of the fact that most of it has been concentrating his energies on the simulacra. Furthermore, the first-person narrative seems pretty weak, to be honest, and half-hearted. I never *really* believed the narrator, the way I do with most of Dick's protagonists. We Can Build You really shouldn't have been published in its current form; there ARE some good things here, but it desperately needs a rewrite or two to filter out the bad. I don't think anything Dick writes is entirely without merit, but this is about as close as it comes. It's a mystery to me why Vintage chose to republish this, specifically, when there are so many better Dick novels long out-of-print.
Rating:
Summary: Another neglected PKD masterpiece
Review: Not one of PKD's famous novels, but one of the very best of the rest (see my review of NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR for more on this phenomenon). Dick actually wrote this in 1962, immediately after THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and at the same time as MARTIAN TIME-SLIP, when he was at the height of his powers. It was conceived, written, and shopped to publishers as a mainstream novel with an sf setting -- and, like Dick's brilliant 50's mainstream novels, it failed to sell (a setback which had a huge influence on his subsequent career). When Dick wrote DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP in 1966, he recycled the unforgettable dark-haired girl character, Pris Frauenzimmer, as Pris Stratton. And when his life fell apart in the early 70's, he finally sold the ms. as a magazine serial. This is, I believe, the only PKD novel written in the first-person. Our hero, Louis Rosen, falls in love with a young schizoid girl. There's the usual amount of brilliant PKD sf speculation (in this case, about what it means to be human), wedded seamlessly to the very best portrayal of a male-female relationship in all his fiction. The dialogue is priceless; there's a scene in a hotel room that has more quotable lines than most writers can muster in a career. There are two aspects to the novel that may bother people who read only sf -- but they are central to the conception and true nature of the book (as both an sf novel and a highly experimental postmodern novel, without compromise to either). First, it changes horses midway, leaving a lot of plot strands dangling (what Kim Stanley Robinson calls Dick's "broken-backed" novel structure), as our narrator becomes more and more obsessed with his femme fatale. In the same way, there's not a lot of *plot* closure in the ending, but there's total emotional closure (a lot like real life). This one will break your heart, as it undoubtedly broke PKD's, in more ways than one.
Rating:
Summary: The Dark Haired Schizophrenic(& Abe Lincoln Reborn)
Review: NOt wanting to detail how much this book means to me and how vastly original and thought provoking it is. i just wanted to say that its my fav. PKD book, a great read. (above one-line summary, the true title of WCBY) thank you
Rating: 
Summary: A psychedelic story of heartbreak
Review: The selling point in this book are the androids. What better hook to engage Dick's readers? But the heart of the story are Louis Rosen and Pris and their doomed relationship... if there is some kind of relationship at all. Exploring mood altering drugs, depression and schizophrenia, Dick's novel is like an allegory of our current Prozac-happy times.
Rating:
Summary: A science-fictional Trojan horse
Review: This is a transitional work between Dick's mainstream novels of the 1950s and the science fiction of the 1960s, as the science-fictional element is de-emphasized in favor of psychological themes. Written in 1962, its first book publication was not until 1972. Critics usually unfairly regard We Can Build You as an artistic failure because what seems to be the main plot of the book - the story of a company that produces simulacra, or lifelike androids of historical Civil War figures - bit by bit dissolves into exclusive focus on the narrator Louis Rosen's obsessive love for his partner's eighteen-year-old daughter, Pris Frauenzimmer. Certainly Dick will confound those expecting conventional narrative unity, for this is an experimental novel masquerading as straight science fiction. It's really kind of a Trojan horse, an sf cover on a book about desire, obsession, and madness. As Louis descends into schizophrenia, the center of interest shifts from the projection of human life on the inanimate through building simulacra, to the search for authentic human feeling within oneself.
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